Just So Stories

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1902, is now considered to be a classic of children's literature. The twelve tales included are all humorous "origin" stories purporting to tell how certain animals gained their distinctive features. For example, "The Elephant's Child" tells how the elephant gained its long trunk because of a baby elephant having its nose pulled and stretched by a crocodile. The stories originated as bedtime tales Kipling invented for his daughter and told to her each night. The stories had to be told in exactly the same words each night-"just so"-or his daughter would complain. Early editions of Just So Stories were illustrated in black and white by Kipling himself, which lends the collection a certain charm. We have reproduced these illustrations in the Standard Ebooks edition of the book. Delightfully whimsical and endlessly quotable, these twelve animal fables have charmed young readers and read-aloud audiences for well over a century. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)